One of the main obstacles to reducing the number of cars clogging streets in places such as lower Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn has been enforcement: police officers have been reluctant to ticket their fellow municipal employees. | Getty

De Blasio vows to end physical parking placards in second crackdown attempt

The de Blasio administration announced a plan to fully digitize parking placards Thursday in a bid to curb rampant abuse and ease a point of contention with public transit and bike advocates, as POLITICO reported earlier in the day.

However, the plan did not include what experts say is the best fix: dramatically reduce the number of permits issued to municipal employees.

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The administration said it would spend $52 million to completely eliminate the current system of laminated cards, which ostensibly exempt their holders from parking rules during certain times and in certain locations. In practice, however, holders of legitimate and fake placards are left to park where they like with impunity. A replacement system called Pay-by-Plate will be rolled out in 2021 and will allow traffic enforcement agents to scan a license plate and immediately determine whether the owner has a valid placard, is authorized to park in the spot and even if the meter has been paid.

“We are going to let technology do the work here, and this will put an end to the use of fake placards once and for all,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said Thursday.

The city also plans to revoke the placard of any driver who has been caught misusing the privilege three times, and will lobby the state to create a new $250 fine for abusing a placard or creating a fake one. Until the new system is rolled out, the city will be expanding the use of bar-coded window stickers that are harder to forge, the mayor said, and will look into providing additional dedicated parking near police precincts and fire departments.

One of the main obstacles to reducing the number of cars clogging streets in places such as lower Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn has been enforcement: police officers have been reluctant to ticket their fellow municipal employees. With that in mind, de Blasio said Wednesday that a team of 10 from the Department of Transportation will comb problem areas such as lower Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn. But it is unclear how far the plans can ultimately go to eliminate the incentive to protect colleagues or avoid ticketing a superior, especially since the transportation department also issues tens of thousands of placards annually and NYPD officers will still be doing enforcement themselves.

“[The plan] is definitely a good thing, but it can all be defeated if cops don’t write tickets,” said Bruce Schaller, a transportation consultant and former deputy commissioner in the city’s Department of Transportation.

De Blasio first vowed to crack down on placard abuse in 2017, and touted a 93 percent increase in tickets between 2016 and last year. But the number of placards has also ballooned over the same time period. The same year de Blasio pledged to take on placard abuse, he gave out 50,000 additional passes to public school workers. The current total for city placards is an estimated 125,000 — an order of magnitude higher than the 10,000 parking spaces designed for placard holders.

Placard users frequently park in bike and bus lanes, impeding traffic and undermining the city’s efforts to increase mobility. The city only issues some of the placards that can be found in the windshields of cars on city streets. District attorneys issue them, as do the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

Ultimately, groups such as TransitCenter said that reducing the number of placards or nixing them altogether is the best way to free up the city’s streets for buses and other public transit.

“The ideal policy would be to scrap these placards,” Ben Fried, a spokesperson for the organization said. “If you’re not going to do that, you have to overcome the problem of people lower down on the totem pole being asked to enforce abuse by people who are above them.”

The mayor said that rethinking the placard system is something the city may take on in the future, but the first step is to reduce the number of fake placards and crack down on drivers who merely place an official-looking object, such as a work vest, in their dashboard to avoid a ticket.